The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of factors such as cutting speed, feed rate, and depth of cut on surface roughness and Material Removed Rate (MRR) when machining in dry face milling AISI 1040 steel with coated carbide inserts GC1030 using the response surface methodology (RSM). For this purpose, a number of machining experiments based on statistical three-factor and three-level factorial experiment designs, completed (L27) with a statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA), were performed in order to develop mathematical models and to identify the significant factors of these technological parameters. Multi-objective optimization procedure for minimizing Ra, Ry and Rz and maximizing MRR using desirability approach has been also implementented. The current study was also carried out to investigate the tool life of the inserts. The models found the relationship between the cutting parameters (Vc, fz and ap) and the studied technological parameters. It has been found that the cutting speed was the most affecting surface roughness which is due to the geometry of the insert which has a scraping edge and enables to obtain low roughness even at important feed rate, followed by the feed rate and the depth of cut at the end. The optimal combination of cutting parameters were cutting speed of 314 m/min, feed rate of 0.16 mm/tooth and depth of cut of 0.6 mm with a composite desirability of 0.924.

In a continuous manufacturing environment where production and consumption occur simultaneously, one of the biggest challenges is the efficient management of production and inventory system. In order to manage the integrated production inventory system economically it is necessary to identify the optimal production time and the optimal production reorder point that either maximize the profit or minimize the cost. In addition, during production the process has to go through some natural phenomena like random breakdown of machine, deterioration of product over time, uncertainty in repair time that eventually create the possibility of shortage. In this situation, efficient management of inventory & production is crucial. This paper addresses the situation where a perishable (deteriorated) product is manufactured and consumed simultaneously, the demand of this product is stable over the time, machine that produce the product also face random failure and the time to repair this machine is also uncertain. In order to describe this scenario more appropriately, the continuously reviewed Economic Production Quantity (EPQ) model is considered in this research work. The main goal is to identify the optimal production uptime and the production reorder point that ultimately minimize the expected value of total cost consisting of machine setup, deterioration, inventory holding, shortage and corrective maintenance cost.

A dynamic system differs from a static system in that it contains signal factor and the target value depends on the level of the signal factor set by the system operator. The aim of optimizing a multi-response dynamic system is to find a setting combination of input controllable factors that would result in optimum values of all response variables at all signal levels. The most commonly used performance metric for optimizing a multi-response dynamic system is the composite desirability function (CDF). The advantage of using CDF is that it is a simple unit less measure and it has a good foundation in statistical practice. However, the problem with the CDF is that it does not consider the variability of the individual response variables. Moreover, if the specification limits for the response variables are not provided the CDF cannot be computed. In this paper, a new performance metric for multi-response dynamic system, called multiple regression-based weighted signal-to-noise ratio (MRWSN) is proposed, which overcome the limitations of CDF. Two sets of experimental data on multi-response dynamic systems, taken from literature, are analysed using both CDF-based and the proposed MRWSN-based approaches for optimization. The results show that the MRWSN-based approach also results in substantially better optimization performance than the CDF-based approach.

We present here a hybrid algorithm for the Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSSP). This problem involves the optimal use of resources in a flexible production environment in which each operation can be carried out by more than a single machine. Our algorithm allocates, in a first step, the machines to operations and in a second stage it sequences them by integrating a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) and a path-dependent search algorithm (Multi-Objective Simulated Annealing), which is enacted at the genetic phase of the procedure. The joint interaction of those two components yields a very efficient procedure for solving the FJSSP. An important step in the development of the algorithm was the selection of the right MOEA. Candidates were tested on problems of low, medium and high complexity. Further analyses showed the relevance of the search algorithm in the hybrid structure. Finally, comparisons with other algorithms in the literature indicate that the performance of our alternative is good.

Nowadays, most manufacturing units try to locate their requirements and the depot vehicle routing in order to transport the goods at optimum cost. Needless to mention that the locations of the required warehouses influence on the performance of vehicle routing. In this paper, a mathematical programming model to optimize the storage location and vehicle routing are presented. The first objective function of the model minimizes the total cost associated with the transportation and storage, and the second objective function minimizes the difference distance traveled by vehicles. The study uses Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to solve the resulted problems in different sizes. The preliminary results have indicated that the proposed study has performed better than NSGA-II and PAES methods in terms of Quality metric and Spacing metric.

A simple yet powerful optimization algorithm is proposed in this paper for solving the constrained and unconstrained optimization problems. This algorithm is based on the concept that the solution obtained for a given problem should move towards the best solution and should avoid the worst solution. This algorithm requires only the common control parameters and does not require any algorithm-specific control parameters. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated by implementing it on 24 constrained benchmark functions having different characteristics given in Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2006) and the performance is compared with that of other well-known optimization algorithms. The results have proved the better effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the statistical analysis of the experimental work has been carried out by conducting the Friedman’s rank test and Holm-Sidak test. The proposed algorithm is found to secure first rank for the ‘best’ and ‘mean’ solutions in the Friedman’s rank test for all the 24 constrained benchmark problems. In addition to solving the constrained benchmark problems, the algorithm is also investigated on 30 unconstrained benchmark problems taken from the literature and the performance of the algorithm is found better.

The current research copes with the optimization of the surface heat transfer coefficients of a square mild steel test specimen by spray impingement cooling. A laboratory scale experimental setup was developed at School of Mechanical Engineering KIIT University, Odisha, India to investigate the role of various process parameters to enhance the heat transfer from the surface of the heated steal specimen. The mild steel plates of dimension 120 mm × 120 mm, and different thicknesses of 4 mm, 6 mm and 8 mm were used in the experiment. The effect of the process parameters such as thickness of the tested plate, nozzle to plate distance, air and water pressure upon the surface heat transfer coefficient (HTC) was optimized. The optimization of the controlling parameters was carried out by using the desirability functions. The Design Expert 8 software was used to analyze the experimental results. A new correlation was developed for optimization of the surface heat transfer coefficient.

The present paper deals with the development of prediction model using response surface methodology and artificial neural network and optimizes the process parameter using 3D surface plot. The experiment has been conducted using coated carbide insert in machining AISI 1040 steel under dry environment. The coefficient of determination value for RSM model is found to be high (R2 = 0.99 close to unity). It indicates the goodness of fit for the model and high significance of the model. The percentage of error for RSM model is found to be only from -2.63 to 2.47. The maximum error between ANN model and experimental lies between -1.27 and 0.02 %, which is significantly less than the RSM model. Hence, both the proposed RSM and ANN prediction model sufficiently predict the surface roughness, accurately. However, ANN prediction model seems to be better compared with RSM model. From the 3D surface plots, the optimal parametric combination for the lowest surface roughness is d1-f1-v3 i.e. depth of cut of 0.1 mm, feed of 0.04 mm/rev and cutting speed of 260 m/min respectively.

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a mathematical model in order to study the relationship between laser cutting parameters such as laser power, cutting speed, assist gas pressure and focus position, and kerf taper angle obtained in CO2 laser cutting of AISI 304 stainless steel. To this aim, a single hidden layer artificial neural network (ANN) trained with gradient descent with momentum algorithm was used. To obtain an experimental database for the ANN training, laser cutting experiment was planned as per Taguchi’s L27 orthogonal array with three levels for each of the cutting parameters. Statistically assessed as adequate, ANN model was then used to investigate the effect of the laser cutting parameters on the kerf taper angle by generating 2D and 3D plots. It was observed that the kerf taper angle was highly sensitive to the selected laser cutting parameters, as well as their interactions. In addition to modeling, by applying the Monte Carlo method on the developed kerf taper angle ANN model, the near optimal laser cutting parameter settings, which minimize kerf taper angle, were determined.

The single machine scheduling problem aims at obtaining the best sequence for a set of jobs in a manufacturing system with a single machine. In this paper, we optimize rewards in single machine scheduling in rewards-driven systems such that total reward is maximized while the constraints contains of limitation in total rewards for earliness and learning, independent of earliness and learning and etc. are satisfied. In mentioned systems as for earliness and learning the bonus is awarded to operators, we consider only rewards in mentioned systems and it will not be penalized under any circumstances. Our objective is to optimize total rewards in mentioned system by taking the rewards in the form of quadratic for both learning and earliness. The recently-developed sequential quadratic programming (SQP), is used by solve the problem. Results show that SQP had satisfactory performance in terms of optimum solutions, number of iterations, infeasibility and optimality error. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the change rate of the objective function obtained based on the change rate of the “amount of earliness for jobs (Ei parameter)”.